Oh yeah…

Forgot to mention something which happened this morning. It was a very small thing but it meant a lot to me.

I crossed the border from North Portal, SK to Portal, ND. The US border patrol guy asked me where I was from, did I make any large purchases, do I have any booze (I did, thank you Liza and Mark!) and what was I doing in Canada. I told him as succinctly as I could – which is very hard since I always seem to have the -v flag (UNIX verbose flag) turned on. He appeared interested and asked me a bunch of questions about Fr Mac. Not the type of questions where he’s doing his job but the type where he knew what was going on in Alberta, seemed concerned and was genuinely interested in hearing what was going on in that neck of the woods. He concluded, handed me a pass that said “Released” which I had to give to the next person at the gate. But what he said next was really cool. “Welcome home.” Yep, just those two words. Two words have never meant so much.